Online Brokerage Transforms IT Operations with Visibility Across Tiers

Greater than 70% improvement in industry benchmark performance

Extensible platform for defining new metrics and open API for integration with homegrown tools

The Beginning

To improve competitiveness, the brokerage sought real-time visibility across tiers

To increase its competitiveness, a large US-based online brokerage sought to improve the performance of its online trading application.

"For brokerages, application performance affects brand reputation, customer attrition, and revenue," explains the Director of IT. "Moreover, brokerages are responsible for best-order execution, or ensuring that orders are placed in a way that is advantageous for the customer."

The infrastructure team responsible for the online trading application previously relied on a variety of homegrown and purchased monitoring tools, each of which covered a portion of the overall environment. Each time a performance issue was identified, the brokerage's IT Operations group brought together experts from internal teams responsible for the network, application code, servers, databases, and storage. Using this resource-intensive process, the organization spent an average of 45 minutes identifying the root cause of a problem.

"To improve our benchmark scores, we needed drastic change, starting with technology solutions that would give us visibility across the entire environment and help break down silos between teams," says the Director of IT.

We give ourselves just five minutes to triage an issue before alerting the entire IT Operations team. Before ExtraHop, this was a tremendous challenge, but now we reliably identify the path to remediation within minutes.

Director of ITUS-Based Online Brokerage Firm

The Transformation

While evaluating different monitoring solutions, the online brokerage deployed ExtraHop in its test environment. An all-in-one appliance, the ExtraHop platform installed in 15 minutes and started passively analyzing transactions as they traversed the network, extracting real-time operational intelligence from all tiers of the application delivery chain.

Illuminating Black Boxes

During the initial deployment of ExtraHop, the brokerage's Development team began testing a more modular version of its web application and found that some important requests performed slowly. When various system-monitoring tools failed to identify the root cause, the manager of capacity, performance, and automation decided to check ExtraHop.

"With ExtraHop, I could investigate all the tiers of the application and then drill down to find the root cause very easily," says the manager. "The issue turned out to be the application repeatedly querying our Sybase database for the date and time instead of caching and reusing data. We could not recognize that behavior with SysMon monitoring Sybase at five-minute intervals. Even if you knew where to look, SysMon would not provide the granularity needed to precisely diagnose the problem. This resulted in a black-box scenario on a very important piece of our infrastructure. When I presented ExtraHop's findings to the developers, they were amazed that ExtraHop could provide such detail off the wire. After that, there was no question about the value of the ExtraHop platform."

Better Collaboration Between Development and Operations

The brokerage's IT organization has used ExtraHop to change how it manages application performance, starting with better collaboration between the Development and IT Operations teams.

"We use ExtraHop to find misconfigurations and bottlenecks in testing, and also for continuous monitoring in production," says the manager of capacity, performance, and automation. "If a developer makes a change in production that slows performance or breaks a service, we know immediately and have the information we need for a meaningful conversation, such as the URI associated with HTTP 500 errors."

The Tool of First Resort

The IT Operations team displays ExtraHop geomaps on 42-inch monitors in its network operations centers. Tier-1 and Tier-2 support teams use ExtraHop as their primary investigative resource. When they see something amiss or receive alerts from ExtraHop, they determine the scope of the problem and then escalate issues to the appropriate teams.

"We give ourselves just five minutes to triage an issue before alerting the entire IT Operations team," says the Director of IT. "Before ExtraHop, this was a tremendous challenge, but now we reliably identify the path to remediation within minutes."

Extensibility and Open API

The brokerage's IT Operations group takes advantage of ExtraHop's extensibility and open API to meet new monitoring needs as they arise. "We don't just use ExtraHop to solve problems as they crop up, but to build on lessons learned," says the brokerage's Application Services Analyst. "ExtraHop enables us to get better at what we do. We use Application Inspection Triggers to define new metrics and export precise, event-driven data to our internal dashboard."

The Outcome

The brokerage's IT Operations group uses ExtraHop to enable greater collaboration among teams and to proactively manage application performance

Equipped with IT operational intelligence
from ExtraHop, the online brokerage
can manage application performance
much more effectively. "I believe the
future of application and infrastructure
performance management lies with
passive solutions like ExtraHop," says the
Director of IT. "It requires no agents to
manage, it's continuous and real time,
and it dynamically adapts to changes.
Moreover, ExtraHop is a mature product
that continues to evolve."

Greater Than 70% Improvement in Industry Benchmark Performance

Due to the improved visibility and process
improvements afforded by ExtraHop, the
brokerage has improved its performance
on industry benchmark metrics, which
measure the total execution time and
success rate for stock-order transactions,
by more than 70 percent.

"ExtraHop is the foundation of our
application performance improvement
efforts," says the Director of IT. "We can
understand the contribution each tier
makes to overall response time and how
different components affect others in
n-tier applications. This visibility has
helped us to continually find efficiencies
and improve our response times."

Improved Cross-Functional Collaboration

ExtraHop helps various teams at the
online brokerage work together more
collaboratively. "Before, we might have
asked the database team to 'look into'
their performance—but that's not a trivial
task for multiple complex RDBMSs. Now,
with ExtraHop, we can give much more
specific direction about what to fix, such
as SQL statements, database methods
invoked, or database tables, and avoid
wasting people's time," says the Director
of IT.

Proactive Management of Issues

The IT infrastructure team uses ExtraHop
to detect small issues before they erupt
into much larger problems. "By the time
customers tell us about slow performance,
it's too late," says the Director of IT. "With
ExtraHop, we can be proactive because
we can see how specific frontend activity
is correlated to activity in our backend
systems. We can see not only what is
happening, but why."